


And All The Roads That Lead You There Were Winding

by Blue_Savannah



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 15:19:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18552418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blue_Savannah/pseuds/Blue_Savannah
Summary: Ten years ago, Ben Solo, son of Han and Leia Solo — they ofMillennium Falconfame — rose to prominence as a rock star in his own right. A somewhat shy kid, he reinvented himself with leather pants, an obscene cartilage piercing and a shiny new moniker: Kylo Ren. More than just an offshoot of his famous parents, he garnered international acclaim for his prodigal guitar skills, surprising lyrical depth, and ability to pair shockingly raw personal details with catchy riffs. Critics loved him. With his rocker turned bluesy-grunge vibe, everyone from Uproxx to Rolling Stone to the New York Times lauded him as the second coming of Stevie Ray Vaughan.Girls loved him too. Rey had been just a kid back then, but she still remembers seeing his face splashed across tabloids in the grocery store, a different emaciated blonde clutching his arm every week. Headlines screeched,Could She Be the One?For a couple years, Kylo indulged in typical famous people activities, including short-lived relationships with supermodels, paparazzi punching, nights of vapid excess and coked out on-stage performances, and then one day, he just … disappeared.





	And All The Roads That Lead You There Were Winding

**Author's Note:**

> Loosely based off _Juliet, Naked_

At 4:32PM, Rey Kenobi gets a text. The text says, _I got the tattoo._

Rey bites the inside of her cheek in disgust, wincing at the taste of blood flooding her mouth. Then she unceremoniously shoves her phone under a pile of magazines and refocuses on the computer screen in front of her. She’s supposed to be writing up a press release for Canon’s newest full-frame mirrorless camera, but her mind has numbed somewhere between _expands upon the existing EOS lineup_ and _I got the tattoo._

Her fingers are poised above the keyboard, frozen in place. Why does she even bother with words, anyway? No one beyond the client is ever going to read this press release, and Hux clearly hadn’t listened when she’d begged, _please don’t get the tattoo._

“Everything OK?” Rey’s deskmate, Amilyn Holdo, swivels her desk chair in Rey’s direction. “You look like you just swallowed your gum on accident.”

“Oh, it's —” Rey breaks off, waving a hand. She’s not sure where she was going with the sentence. It’s her relationship with Hux, but it also isn’t. It’s the monotony of this job, but it also isn’t. It’s both of those things mixed in with the catastrophe of not knowing what she wants, and all of it has coalesced in the pit of her stomach like a lump of undigested food. She can’t swallow around it. It just sits there heavily, an ever-present reminder that this isn’t right, that she’s meant to be doing something else, something _better._ Only she doesn’t know what. 

Amilyn’s still watching her, head cocked. The ends of her purple-tipped hair graze the tip of her collared shirt, out of which peek layers of delicate gold necklaces. Last week, Amilyn’s hair was bubblegum pink and she’d gone for rocker chic accessories, like the spiked wristlet and over-the-top collection of studded skulls that HR had asked her to remove. A fashion chameleon, Amilyn makes change look effortless when it’s just _not_ ; Rey knows its not, and so why does everyone else seem to sail effortlessly into new and exciting things while she can’t seem to dig herself out of this goddamn fucking rut she’s fallen into—

“Rey?”

Rey looks up. “I’m sorry. Don’t mind me. I’m just lost in thought over here trying to think of what to get Hux for his birthday.”

It’s a blatant lie, but she and Amilyn are work friends. Their relationship hasn’t yet plumbed the surface level chatter of basic life details to reach the oceanic depths of problems and emotions. Even if she knew Amilyn was willing to listen, Rey wouldn’t even know where to begin extolling her problems. 

Amilyn perks up immediately. “Oh! When is it?”

“Next week,” Rey invents wildly. She turns subtly back to her computer in hopes of dissuading Amilyn, but no such luck. Amilyn only reaches into a drawer and throws two stubs of paper onto her desktop with the smugly self-satisfied air of someone who has Solved A Difficult Problem. 

“What’s this?” Rey fingers one of the stubs. “It looks like—”

“Tickets to the _Millennium Falcon_ concert,” Amilyn says with relish. “They’re playing in New York next week, at Madison Square Garden! Isn’t Hux like a music buff, or something? These are perfect!”

 _Oh fuck no._ Rey pretends to be distracted by an email popping up on her screen to avoid looking back at Amilyn. Something huge and ineffable is building inside her like an oncoming storm, like the precursor to anger and frustration and despair. She wishes the press release were a piece of paper that she could ball up and throw at the trash can, because there’s not a satisfying equivalent in the digital world. She settles for hitting the spacebar key a couple times, much harder than the situation warrants. It doesn’t help anything.

“Um, no, that’s so nice of you, but I couldn’t possibly —”

“Please,” Amilyn thrusts the tickets further into Rey’s face. “My uncle works at their label, so I get free tickets all the time. I can’t even go next week, and neither can my best friend, so you’d actually be doing me a favor by taking these off my hands.”

Amilyn’s green eyes are so bright, her smile bordering just on the edge of vulnerability. Rey doesn’t know how to tell her _no_. This is not a new problem, by any means.

———-

The tattoo stretches from the upper part of Hux’s waist to the very bottom of his left shoulder. His entire rib cage is mutilated with a red mottling of irritated skin and thick blue-black ink. “Well,” he straightens, dropping his shirt. “What d’ya think?”

Rey bites her thumbnail, making a loud _cracking noise_ in the stillness between them. She’s been doing this a lot today — chewing on various body parts and swallowing back the things she wants to say. Her stomach is a graveyard of Rey’s True Feelings. “Well, it’s on your body,” she points out, “so it doesn’t matter what I think. If you’re happy, then I’m happy.”

Hux snorts. “Points for passive aggression, Rey.”

Rey turns back to the stove and stirs the simmering pasta hard enough that a piece of dried tortellini goes flying and skids drily into the sink. “Hux, I told you that getting tattoos of people’s faces isn’t the smartest thing to do. What if you wake up two years from now, and you decide you’re not a Kylo Ren fan anymore? Tattoos are like, expensive and time consuming to remove. Also painful.”

Hux snorts again, louder this time, as if the mere idea that he wouldn’t always be worshipping at the altar of Kylo Ren is simply too preposterous to believe. 

Hux is a deputy music writer at Rolling Stone, and in his opinion, this qualifies him as the music expert both in their shared apartment, and in the world at large. In the galaxy of Hux’s obsessions, reclusive rock star Kylo Ren is the black hole that has consumed him for the better part of five years. When Rey first met Hux a little over two years ago, that obsession was cleverly disguised as passion, and she’d found it charming. It took her six months to discover Hux’s “office” — a shrine littered with newspaper cutouts, water-stained polaroids and grainy yearbook pictures that traced Kylo’s life from childhood to present day. The whole thing was disturbingly serial killer-esque. 

Rey checks the timer. Two more minutes until the pasta’s ready. “Well I think he really is done making music,” She offers up tentatively. “Maybe it’s time to let him go.”

Ten years ago, Ben Solo, son of Han and Leia Solo — they of _Millennium Falcon_ fame — rose to prominence as a rock star in his own right. A somewhat shy kid, he reinvented himself with leather pants, an obscene cartilage piercing and a shiny new moniker: Kylo Ren. More than just an offshoot of his famous parents, he garnered international acclaim for his prodigal guitar skills, surprising lyrical depth, and ability to pair shockingly raw personal details with catchy riffs. Critics loved him. With his rocker turned bluesy-grunge vibe, everyone from Uproxx to Rolling Stone to the New York Times lauded him as the second coming of Stevie Ray Vaughan. 

Girls loved him too. Rey had been just a kid back then, but she still remembers seeing his face splashed across tabloids in the grocery store, a different emaciated blonde clutching his arm every week. Headlines screeched, _Could She Be the One?_ For a couple years, Kylo indulged in typical famous people activities, including short-lived relationships with supermodels, paparazzi punching, nights of vapid excess and coked out on-stage performances, and then one day, he just … disappeared.

On January 12, 2009, he was performing at Mercury Lounge, when he went to the bathroom in between sets, and never came back. Media camped outside his Park Ave apartment for days, but he never showed his face, and police examination revealed that his penthouse suite had been abandoned for months. On _60 Minutes_ , a tight-lipped Han and Leia revealed that while they didn’t know where Kylo was per say, he was on an existential journey somewhere in Asia, and fans could certainly expect more of his trademark rocker-grunge hits in the future.

That was ten years ago now, and Kylo hasn’t been spotted since.

Conspiracy theories sprouted like wayward dandelions. Fans believed that he was living as a Buddhist monk in Cambodia so that he could learn to appreciate the power of silence. Others believed he’d shunned his life of excess to take up Sherpa farming, or maybe he’d gone on a scientific exploration to the Arctic Circle. _Now_ , they speculated, _he only plays his Fender Strat in the company of endangered polar bears_.

Rey’s live-in boyfriend Hux is the ringleader of _Decoding a Legend_ , a forum solely devoted to overanalyzing the minutiae of Kylo’s previous works, and deconstructing wild rumors about his current location.

On the forum, Hux wields his title of _deputy music editor_ like armor, like it somehow justifies his intense obsession with a musician who fled from his fame a decade ago. At precisely 9PM every Tuesday, Hux gets drunk off Wild Turkey shots while he skypes the other misfits who subscribe to his site. It is one of the few times Rey can relax. She barricades herself in their shared bedroom, props herself up amid the wild array of fringe pillows she likes to purchase from the home section of Urban Outfitters, and works on her writing.

She only showed Hux her writing one time. She thought that as an editor, he’d be able to relate to her work, or at the very least, be able to give her some pointers — but instead, his mouth did that thing it does whenever he tastes mayonnaise (and he loathes mayonnaise).

 _It’s good, babe_ was the only piece of feedback he gave her, and that was another clue. Hux never resisted the urge to wax poetic on anything. If he did, it was a bad sign. 

So Rey just nodded numbly, and locked all that shattered vulnerability in a storage crate inside her head where she could parse through it later, preferably at a time when it didn’t hurt so much. In the meantime, she created a tumblr where she posted her creative works weekly under the pseudonym of Daisy Ridley. If anyone commented anything hurtful (and people inevitably did; it was an unfortunate side effect of being human), it didn’t bother her as much when it was directed at Daisy, versus Rey. In a weird way, it made Rey wonder whether Ben Solo had changed his name to Kylo Ren for the same reason, and if that leather pants-wearing, guitar shredding persona protected him from the harsh glare of the audience. 

“Let him go?” Hux screeches, bringing Rey sharply back to present day. She registers a distant pain in her left hand and realizes that the pasta is boiling over, spitting hot water onto her wrist. “Rey, you understand how important Kylo is to me. I know you weren’t exactly on board with the tattoo, but I’d hoped that you would be more supportive of my passions. Partners are supposed to support each other.”

Rey doesn’t know how to articulate how unhealthy it is to be so obsessed with a famous person — to the detriment of your own life and relationships — especially when that person doesn’t even know you exist. A therapist once told her she internalizes. It made her imagine her innards coated slickly with emotions instead of blood, the pain of all those unsaid things literally tainting her from the inside out. But that same therapist was never really able to coach Rey from internalization to self-expression and so now Rey just stands numbly in place, nursing her stinging palm. 

Hux sighs deeply, reaches for the strainer, and carefully pours the pot of boiling water out into the sink. Steam billows towards the lights. “I thought we were working on this,” he continues, managing to sound both patronizing and injured at the same time. “Weren’t you the one who said we needed to work on our relationship?”

He drizzles tomato sauce wildly across the tortellini, splattering red globs onto the counter. 

“Yes,” Rey answers carefully, watching him shovel pasta into his mouth with the mindless concentration of a zombie. How can this be all there is? It can’t possibly be. There is no way life is this … _boring_. Here she is, waiting on a man to display a modicum of the passion he regularly displays for a washed-up rockstar. Maybe she should have broken up with him already, but their life together is comfortable. They have a sofa, a shag rug and shared bills. Besides, after her pathetic childhood that’s basically a series of people saying they didn’t want her, she’s not exactly in the position to be turning down anyone who wants to be with her now, even if that wanting is half-hearted. 

She wishes … _oh_. What is it like, to be wanted? She imagines hands reaching for hers in the darkness. She imagines fingers soft at the nape of her neck and eyes looking into hers, urging, _tell me how you feel, I won’t leave you_. But it’s when she imagines the _who_ that she encounters problems. Because it’s not Hux’s face — it’s never Hux’s face; it’s a blurred-out visage, like something you see behind the frosted glass of a shower door.

“Rey?”

She turns abruptly towards her boyfriend. “What?”

“I asked whether you still want to work on our relationship.”

Hux’s blue eyes are shuttered. She can’t tell what he’s thinking, whether this relationship is something he still wants. Would he be relieved if she said _no_? His face reveals nothing.

Rey is terrified of being lonely. Loneliness is the diorama of her childhood. It’s the sad soundtrack to her life. It makes her remember the way women used to look at her when they came to the orphanage, that quick mouth press, that glossed over glance, that _yeah no thanks_ written all over their faces. Right now she feels she is Hux’s _maybe_ , but isn’t that still better than a _no thanks_? She wants so desperately to be somebody’s _yes please_ but she’s not even sure _yes pleases_ exist for her.

Rey blows a deep breath. “Of course I do,” she says.

———-

That night, when Hux is snoring in bed next to her, Rey stares at the black outline of the tattoo in the darkness. It’s a close up of Kylo’s face, replica of a famous picture taken from one of his early performances at Red Rocks, in Colorado. Kylo’s got his head thrown back, seemingly in artistic ecstacy, throat tautened right before he opens his mouth to sing. In real life the picture is stunningly gorgeous, with the dying sunlight gilding Kylo’s face, the red rocks bathed in light, and that vast expanse of blue sky steadily edging towards black, pin pricked with the beginnings of silver. All that beauty couldn’t fit on Hux’s body though, so the tattoo is just of Kylo’s face.

Rey reaches out, traces the frame of it with her little finger. 

Because of Hux, she’s seen lots of videos of Kylo performing.

In the early days, he was bright and ferocious and volatile, burning from the inside out. His smile alone could light up an auditorium. The best word for it was _alive_. You could look at him and know immediately that he was filled with the sheer joy of existing in the world and doing the thing he was supposed to be doing. But as Kylo’s performing years wore on, he got deader. In more recent performances, he looked like a rockstar shaped hunk of meat, propped up behind the mic, shaking with whatever he’d taken before the show. It was like he’d directed all that aliveness inside; he’d internalized it until it swallowed him whole. 

Rey recognizes that in herself, too. She worries she’s teetering on the precipice of something, like she’s two steps away from falling off entirely, from being eaten up alive.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Oasis's _Wonderwall_


End file.
